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I see this as an important stage of going green: Recently/Currently: Unpredictable spikes in wind+solar power make it less profitable to run base-load power pl

I see this as an important stage of going green: Recently/Currently: Unpredictable spikes in wind+solar power make it less profitable to run base-load power plants, since they can no longer guarantee profit at 100% of their duty cycle. Cleaner natural gas peaker plants replace the coal+oil baseload capacity. Currently/Soon: solar+battery costs fall below natural gas costs, so battery-storage systems replace peaker plants. Near future: The transportation network converts from gasoline to electricity, absorbing spikes in generation. Further future: baseload is entirely wind+solar, small and moderate spikes go into batteries that are distributed throughout the grid. But because baseload capacity is scaled to typical demand during typical weather, there are periodically very, very large power generation spikes when wind or sun is strong, generating a lot of temporary energy at essentially 0 cost. I hope this power is used to power negative-emission technologies.

Xixi 9y ago
I'm not quite sure how to precisely calculate the need, however I'm afraid that you are over-estimating battery capacities. Tesla's Giga Factory planned annual battery production capacity is 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). Assuming one cycle per day, and a life expectancy of 1000 cycles, dedicating all this plant production to replace peaker plants will give you a storage capacity of about 100 GWh. While non-trivial, it's still dwarfed by US daily electricity consumption: about 11,350 GWh [1]. Not sure how much would be needed for peaks, but 100 GWh sounds small. And the Giga Factory production is not going towards trying to absorb peaks in the US, but in cars used all around the world in non-optimal patterns. [1] Based on an annual consumption of 4,144.3 TWh in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Most cars are parked during the solar peak and during the overnight wind peak, so there's plenty of opportunity to use ordinary electric car charging as storage.
- freeflight 9y ago
  Tesla batteries might not solve the storage problem on their own, but there are plenty of additional ways to store energy. Imho up until recently, we didn't even have that much incentive to research and innovate on large-scale energy storage (outside of storing it as fossil fuels), as we would just generate it when we needed it, so no real need to store it, no need to innovate on that front. But with the abundance of energy created by renewables, we will need to rethink our approach to energy production and consumption, putting more of a focus on storage than was needed before.
  - Xixi 9y ago
    Indeed, I was specifically talking about batteries. But there are many other ways to store energy. They don't even need to be as efficient as batteries, as long as they are cheap/scalable. Found an interesting study after some googling: https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of-storage-v20.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of...
floatrock 9y ago
> Currently/Soon: solar+battery costs fall below natural gas costs, so battery-storage systems replace peaker plants. Already happening... the application to build the Puente gas peaker in California has been suspended (for now) when it was realized storage could be a cost-competitive alternative: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage-is-threatening-natural-gas-peaker-plants https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage...
ohthehugemanate 9y ago
That's the hope. The reality is of course more complicated. You characterize the current situation quite well: "Unpredictable spikes in wind+solar power make it less profitable to run base-load power plants." It's important to add that subsidies for renewables mean that the baseload providers have to compete with artificially cheap power, at the same time. This double whammy is important to bear in mind. In Germany, the spikes are up to 25% of national energy production. So that side of the double whammy is pretty intense. On the other side, the renewables subsidy is also very painful. Power companies must, by law, buy consumer surplus renewable power at a fixed, much-higher-than-market price. So not only do they have to compete with cheaper-than-free, they have to pay for it, too! This is why German electricity prices are some of the highest in the world, and yet profit margins are some of the slimmest in the world. It's hard to overstate the precariousness of the situation for energy producers in Germany. The largest one (Eon) has lost over 75% of their share value in the last 8 years. Since 2008, energy providers have been the worst performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of share prices. This is not "less profitable", this is "almost impossible". As a result, most of them are getting out of the power generation business. Where that ends is anybody's guess. But what we see today is with only 22% of the energy infrastructure provided by variable renewables. What will happen if we hit the 35% target in 2020? In order to survive, power production companies turn to the cheapest forms of power they can. Because of shale-gas boom in the US displaced coal use there, the cheapest option in Germany is brown coal. This is also happening at a time when Germany decided to decommission all it's zero-emission nuclear plants, so there's a lot of baseload support being built, which ends up as coal. End result: the more renewable power generation you have, the more baseload comes from dirty coal. Germany's CO2 emissions from energy production have actually gone UP since these policies came into effect, even though renewables make up an enormous percentage (almost 34%!) of our power generation. You seem to think that gas power might be competitive here. I don't know the rest of the world market, but that is not the case in Germany. LCOE calculations I've seen are that "ideal case" lignite costs between 2,7 - 5 euro cents per kWh. Combined cycle gas costs between 4,1€ - 7 cents. Not much competition there. Solar is between 3,5 - 18 cents per kWh, so even though the price is lower than gas, the risk is much greater. Currently/Soon: "Solar+battery costs fall below natural gas costs." I mean, that's nice. But when? And how? And who will do it? The variability of solar costs is a massive obstacle. In Germany, we subsidize combustion engines and diesel. Electric car adoption is actually on the decline in the last couple of years. So while I like the vision you lay out, it's far from a fait accompli. Near future: I don't even know where to start on this. This phase is a pipe dream as far as I can tell. The infrastructure costs are outrageous. Are you aware of a country that is doing this? Further future: "baseload is entirely wind+solar" is just not possible. Wind and solar have variability measured in multiples. Baseload is typically estimated at 35-40% of total power consumption. If 40% of our power is supplied by wind/PV, then you're talking about handling spikes of more than 40%, when demand is already at its peak! What infrastructure can you imagine, that can occupy 40% of a country's power production... and switch on and off periodically, and scale rapidly? For a sense of scale, in the US, you could manage this by heating up Lake Erie by 3 degrees celsius in an hour. That would burn about 40% of the total energy production of the country. Furthermore, what energy grid can handle that? And who will pay to upgrade it? The cost to upgrade the EU energy grid to a "smart grid" is estimated at just over $1 Trillion. No energy company can afford to pay that; especially after taking such brutal losses for the last decade. So while this seems like a stage in an orderly progression, that's an illusion. The reality is much more chaotic, where our best-laid plans end up with counter-intuitive results (renewable subsidies RAISE CO2 emissions?!?), there are no silver bullets (PV and wind cannot provide baseload power), and there are no guarantees (the big power companies might just fold or move into other areas).

Xixi 9y ago

I'm not quite sure how to precisely calculate the need, however I'm afraid that you are over-estimating battery capacities. Tesla's Giga Factory planned annual battery production capacity is 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). Assuming one cycle per day, and a life expectancy of 1000 cycles, dedicating all this plant production to replace peaker plants will give you a storage capacity of about 100 GWh. While non-trivial, it's still dwarfed by US daily electricity consumption: about 11,350 GWh [1]. Not sure how much would be needed for peaks, but 100 GWh sounds small. And the Giga Factory production is not going towards trying to absorb peaks in the US, but in cars used all around the world in non-optimal patterns. [1] Based on an annual consumption of 4,144.3 TWh in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

greglindahl 9y ago
Most cars are parked during the solar peak and during the overnight wind peak, so there's plenty of opportunity to use ordinary electric car charging as storage.
freeflight 9y ago
Tesla batteries might not solve the storage problem on their own, but there are plenty of additional ways to store energy. Imho up until recently, we didn't even have that much incentive to research and innovate on large-scale energy storage (outside of storing it as fossil fuels), as we would just generate it when we needed it, so no real need to store it, no need to innovate on that front. But with the abundance of energy created by renewables, we will need to rethink our approach to energy production and consumption, putting more of a focus on storage than was needed before.
- Xixi 9y ago
  Indeed, I was specifically talking about batteries. But there are many other ways to store energy. They don't even need to be as efficient as batteries, as long as they are cheap/scalable. Found an interesting study after some googling: https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of-storage-v20.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of...

floatrock 9y ago

> Currently/Soon: solar+battery costs fall below natural gas costs, so battery-storage systems replace peaker plants. Already happening... the application to build the Puente gas peaker in California has been suspended (for now) when it was realized storage could be a cost-competitive alternative: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage-is-threatening-natural-gas-peaker-plants https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage...

ohthehugemanate 9y ago

That's the hope. The reality is of course more complicated. You characterize the current situation quite well: "Unpredictable spikes in wind+solar power make it less profitable to run base-load power plants." It's important to add that subsidies for renewables mean that the baseload providers have to compete with artificially cheap power, at the same time. This double whammy is important to bear in mind. In Germany, the spikes are up to 25% of national energy production. So that side of the double whammy is pretty intense. On the other side, the renewables subsidy is also very painful. Power companies must, by law, buy consumer surplus renewable power at a fixed, much-higher-than-market price. So not only do they have to compete with cheaper-than-free, they have to pay for it, too! This is why German electricity prices are some of the highest in the world, and yet profit margins are some of the slimmest in the world. It's hard to overstate the precariousness of the situation for energy producers in Germany. The largest one (Eon) has lost over 75% of their share value in the last 8 years. Since 2008, energy providers have been the worst performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of share prices. This is not "less profitable", this is "almost impossible". As a result, most of them are getting out of the power generation business. Where that ends is anybody's guess. But what we see today is with only 22% of the energy infrastructure provided by variable renewables. What will happen if we hit the 35% target in 2020? In order to survive, power production companies turn to the cheapest forms of power they can. Because of shale-gas boom in the US displaced coal use there, the cheapest option in Germany is brown coal. This is also happening at a time when Germany decided to decommission all it's zero-emission nuclear plants, so there's a lot of baseload support being built, which ends up as coal. End result: the more renewable power generation you have, the more baseload comes from dirty coal. Germany's CO2 emissions from energy production have actually gone UP since these policies came into effect, even though renewables make up an enormous percentage (almost 34%!) of our power generation. You seem to think that gas power might be competitive here. I don't know the rest of the world market, but that is not the case in Germany. LCOE calculations I've seen are that "ideal case" lignite costs between 2,7 - 5 euro cents per kWh. Combined cycle gas costs between 4,1€ - 7 cents. Not much competition there. Solar is between 3,5 - 18 cents per kWh, so even though the price is lower than gas, the risk is much greater. Currently/Soon: "Solar+battery costs fall below natural gas costs." I mean, that's nice. But when? And how? And who will do it? The variability of solar costs is a massive obstacle. In Germany, we subsidize combustion engines and diesel. Electric car adoption is actually on the decline in the last couple of years. So while I like the vision you lay out, it's far from a fait accompli. Near future: I don't even know where to start on this. This phase is a pipe dream as far as I can tell. The infrastructure costs are outrageous. Are you aware of a country that is doing this? Further future: "baseload is entirely wind+solar" is just not possible. Wind and solar have variability measured in multiples. Baseload is typically estimated at 35-40% of total power consumption. If 40% of our power is supplied by wind/PV, then you're talking about handling spikes of more than 40%, when demand is already at its peak! What infrastructure can you imagine, that can occupy 40% of a country's power production... and switch on and off periodically, and scale rapidly? For a sense of scale, in the US, you could manage this by heating up Lake Erie by 3 degrees celsius in an hour. That would burn about 40% of the total energy production of the country. Furthermore, what energy grid can handle that? And who will pay to upgrade it? The cost to upgrade the EU energy grid to a "smart grid" is estimated at just over $1 Trillion. No energy company can afford to pay that; especially after taking such brutal losses for the last decade. So while this seems like a stage in an orderly progression, that's an illusion. The reality is much more chaotic, where our best-laid plans end up with counter-intuitive results (renewable subsidies RAISE CO2 emissions?!?), there are no silver bullets (PV and wind cannot provide baseload power), and there are no guarantees (the big power companies might just fold or move into other areas).